This is a follow-up to my earlier post about Monbiot’s book on climate change. In that post, I stated that I was interested in long-term emissions targets because they will probably constrain transportation planning over the course of my career. Now that I’m looking at the issue more closely, I’ve found some relevant research: a great report from Robin Hickman and David Banister in the UK, Visioning and Backcasting for UK Transport Policy or VIBAT. (Reference courtesy of Todd Litman, VTPI.) It looks at the transport problem in the UK through a similar lens as Monbiot, but with considerably more rigour. For the record, VIBAT is not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, although it has been presented at academic conferences. To date, I have only read the executive summary and skimmed the rest.
Domestic transportation in the UK emitted 39 MtC/year (megatonnes of carbon per year) in 1990, the Kyoto baseline. It rose slightly to 41 MtC/year by 2000, and is projected to rise to 52 MtC/year by 2030 in a “business-as-usual” scenario. A recent Department for Transport white paper suggested new policies for the UK, and projected that the 2030 level would be 38 MtC/year if those policies were adopted, a very small reduction from 1990 levels.
Hickman and Banister took a more dramatic approach. They chose a target of 60% reduction in domestic UK transportation emissions by 2030 from the standard 1990 baseline, aiming for a 15 MtC/year emissions level. This is not Monbiot’s target of a 90% cut by 2030, but it’s still an ambitious choice, somewhat more aggressive than the official UK goal of 60% by 2050.
In the early framing of the paper, the problems of air travel are abundantly clear: UK international air emissions are currently 8 MtC, and might be projected to rise to 20 MtC by 2030. I can’t imagine a scenario where it would be politically acceptable for air travel to be given a bigger slice of emissions than all domestic transportation. As the authors state, “Reducing carbon emissions from international air travel should be a priority for research and action.” In the report, they focus on domestic emissions alone, and leave air travel and international shipping outside their scope.
The authors came up with two scenarios for the policy climate in 2030.
Continue reading Backcasting: From Climate to Transportation
Monthly Archives: December 2007
Site Split
In the wake of the Facebook explosion, I’ve been thinking more about my public/private face on the web. This site started as a personal site with some professional sidelines, like my old work in computer graphics and my transportation bibliography. However, I’ve decided that I want this to primarily be my professional face to the world, and so I’m splitting the blog in half. This is mostly just for cleanness of presentation, avoiding littering my professional site with personal cruft.
My personal posts will now be at personal.davidpritchard.org; please visit at your leisure, update your bookmarks and add the new side to your feed reader. My professional posts will remain on this site. If you do want to read both, you can just subscribe to both, or use the blended feed.
As part of this reorganization, I’m also going to start publishing a feed of news clippings I find interesting. Both the professional and personal sites have an additional feed on the right that you can subscribe to if you’re interested. The professional one is focused on transportation and land use articles, while the personal one has more entertainment, web miscellanea and politics. Also, in case you missed the addition, my personal site has a list of movie reviews in the sidebar (using the same plugin as Eric).
Finally, if you’ve never tried using feeds and “subscribing” to blogs, I encourage you to try it out (click on the “Entries” link at the top right of the site). Google Reader is a great tool for following blogs, and it makes it far easier to absorb information from far-flung corners of the web. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.